The Song

The song

Oisin screamed himself awake and bent upright, his veins swollen hard with angry blood. Every muscle tensed with panic and his throat dried up. Sweat streamed from all his pores, glistening in the moonlit dark and pasting the sheet opaque across his chest.
His eyes flared crazy wide.
The white part watered up and then gave way to the tiny veins bleeding them into red. Both of his orbits expanded against his cheeks and forehead and his bright blue irises struggled to contain the exploding black of his pupils.
He stared out at the world.
It was dark and silent, but it was real. He almost got a glimpse of the fading dream he’d just left. Oisin's heart stalled then pushed out twice as much blood as normal, losing it's rhythm and his lungs forgot to inhale. The moment hung there, suspended in what he wanted life to be, then it crashed into what life really was.
He got it.
Oisin opened his lungs and sucked in a giant gasp of night air. Time crashed around him as his reality caught up with the world. He pushed open the bed sheet and flung himself out of bed. The cold of the floor stung his flesh when they met, but it felt good. It reassured him that he was awake.
He finally got it.
He'd always known he would.
Giddiness started to tickle his insides. Light as a feather at first, it circled around a spot just above his stomach and below his ribcage. It spiraled out and intensified. Now his whole body shook. He could not walk. He knew the room he was trapped in like the back of his hand, but he lumbered across it, almost incapacitated by anticipation. Each square of the checkered floor seem to drag under him unbearably slowly. Even the air thickened around him like drying plaster, slowing him down, pulling him back to bed. But Oisin was determined. He pushed on.
He had it.
He had been wrestling with it for so long now. It had become an obsession. Entire days were spent on it, maybe even months. It had been so long; that Oisin had even forgotten when he first started thinking about it.
Yea, he forgot when it began, imagine that, but he couldn't let it go.
It haunted him, like the ghosts of all the men he had seen die.
His mind swirled into a scrambled hash, serving up memories in rapid disjointed flashes. Screaming friends with their intestines spread out across the battlefield, begging him not to let them die , and dark-skinned strangers ripped lifeless by the bullets he had fired into them collided, and his dreams became nightmares. Through it all was a melody. A melody he heard snatches of, but could never finish. Oisin thought that if he could finish the song, the nightmares would stop. If he could just resolve that last melody, he could make it through the night without waking up in a sweaty scream. It seamed so easy, but the melody was so haunting that the resolution eluded him. He couldn't just end it any old way. It had to be the right way. It had to be those three perfect chords. Three chords that would masterfully vibrate down the fret board, swirl around briefly in the body of his guitar, then explode out the sound hole in a monumental conclusion to his masterpiece. Three chords he knew he would find, but had been eluding his fingertips.
Until now.
He had heard them in a dream. He saw them. He watched, amazed, as his own fingers spread across the rosewood neck of his guitar. Oisin knew what he needed to play.
It seemed like centuries since he woke from his dream, but he had finally struggled across the floor and into his chair. He picked up his guitar and strummed the strings to make sure they were in tune. He tightened up the G string because it was a little flat. Satisfied, Oisin strummed a couple of chords, then reached out to the music stand and grabbed a pencil. He scribbled in the conclusion of his song across the staffs of the sheet music in front of him. It looked good; it felt right. A smile curled up into his eyes.
Oisin started to play.
His hands floated up and down, dexterous fingers brilliantly pulling their assigned stings. It all came together. The puzzle was complete! Oisin played harder and louder. The music poured out from his guitar and melted all over him like a warm summer rain. He couldn't remember ever being this happy. All his life, since he first tried to wrap his tiny four year old fingers around the neck of a guitar, he had dreamed of writing his masterpiece. He had finally done it.
Oisin closed his eyes and played. He played and played. The sun came over the mountains to the east, but Oisin never noticed. He just kept on playing, joyously lost in the masterpiece he finally completed. He didn't here Jose come into his room and start yelling at him.
"Oisin, what the fuck are you doing?" Jose crossed the room and grabbed Oisin, hoisting him up by his waist, "How did you get over here?"
Oisin ignored him and kept playing.
"I don't know what you think you are trying to prove," Jose said as he flopped Oisin 's rebellious body back into the hospital bed. "But I swear, if you keep getting out of bed, you'll be the first guy with his arms and legs blown off that this VA hospital ever had to constrain."
Oisin ignored him and kept on playing.